Chartbook 426 Greenland v. the price of lab monkeys.

Another weekend. Another outrageous Trump-centered crisis to derail any kind of sustained thought. Venezuela, the Fed, now Greenland (again).

I start the weekend determined to write about something systemic, recurring and fundamental, but not obvious - the price of lab monkeys.

Instead, we are here. With the headlines warning of naked NATO-on-NATO violence and the real possibility of a historic European surrender. Or perhaps not. Who knows. What is clear is that the Trump-Greenland saga is gratuitous, grotesque, absurd. It would be a bad idea to spend too much mental effort trying to rationalize it. But how can we not? And how can we not ask, why there is no one in America willing or able to put an end to humiliating nonsense? But as important as those questions are, the crisis that provokes them is utterly gratuitous.

So what do we do? How to continue thinking seriously about the world when so much of the news is dominated by a very powerful clown with no one to stop him?

I am brought back to the dualistic image of a recent New York Times piece in which I contrasted Trump’s steam punk, COSPLAY madhouse with the classic dialectic of modern power, which in China is being raised to a new pitch. China is both rolling out massive green energy capacity and struggling with huge problems of decarbonization. These are real challenges. Trump, by contrast, simply denies the issue. Bans wind turbines and has his family money invested fusion.

The short Times piece was about energy. But I think this dualism applies more generally. We are living through a historic divergence in rationality. This isn’t to say that Trump does not have his reasons. Everyone has reasons. But his reasons and those of the subordinates who encourage and enable him, are clearly ordered in quite idiosyncratic ways.

Does one type of (ir)rationality condition the other? Is this another instance of uneven and combined development? Is it China’s rise that drives America mad? Perhaps. But the Frankenstein monster that is MAGA has roots that go back deeper.

In any case, there is a danger that trying to make sense of Trump becomes our sole preoccupation. This not only distract us from broader and more productive developments going on around the world. MAGA’s darkness makes more conventional modernity seem more clean-cut than it really is.

Which brings us to the price of lab